Bank OZK's Bed-Stuy Loan Moves to Private Credit at $137.5M

Bank OZK, among the largest commercial construction lenders in the country, is off a finished Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment building. Nine instruments dated July 29 and recorded August 20 against 12 Halsey Street show the bank assigning its mortgages to AB Commercial Real Estate Private Debt Fund, LLC, a vehicle of AllianceBernstein, which then advanced $54,350,000 of new principal and consolidated the whole position at $137,500,000.

For a New York developer, the useful part is the stage at which this happened. The building is built. It took its initial certificate of occupancy on October 1, 2025 for 240 units, and the AB fund is lending against a standing asset at roughly 1.65 times what the construction lender had recorded.

Why it matters

The record shows an assignment, not a satisfaction. Bank OZK’s mortgages were transferred rather than discharged, which is the standard consolidation structure in New York, because keeping already-taxed principal alive spares the borrower a second round of mortgage recording tax. At the 2.80 percent rate that applies to a city mortgage of $500,000 or more on commercial property, carrying the old $83,150,000 across instead of paying it off avoids roughly $2.3 million by our calculation.

What the documents do not say is what the AB fund paid Bank OZK for that paper, or whether the bank came out whole. An assignment is how a refinancing gets done here and also how a loan sale gets done, and the land records cannot tell the two apart. The direction is what is legible: bank construction paper moving to a private credit fund at completion. The same read applied to RXR’s 530 Fifth Avenue debt last month.

The numbers

Fulton Property Owner LLC, the joint venture of EJS Real Estate and Hope Street Capital, bought the assemblage in March 2022 on a deed recorded at $33,601,602. Bank OZK’s construction financing followed in December 2023 and was announced as a $108,150,000 package. Only $83,150,000 of it reached the land records, as a $20,000,000 consolidation plus mortgages of $53,043,591 and $10,106,409. That $83,150,000 and the new $54,350,000 sum to $137,500,000 exactly, which confirms the August agreement as the full consolidated principal rather than new money alone.

What’s next

The certificate of occupancy has been renewed four times, most recently on August 10, 2026, so the building is still short of a final one. Watch for a permanent certificate and for a satisfaction of the AB mortgages, which is the only document that will later prove how this loan ends. More Brooklyn records are tracked at our New York desk.